Glass Help

[tbny]

I am doing montages of a "twisty" type tower. Location and all very hush-hush so I can only show a small bit of the image here.

 

I am having problems getting the glass to look well for the montage. There are no other really high building surrounding the tower and the sky in the photo is reasonably flat blue (not the sky shown in the image).

 

 

i.e. there is not much to reflect of the surroundings but the client wants the glass to be glossy and reflective looking and yet not completely loose a sense of transperancy...

 

The tower has an outer frameless glass skin and everything else is behind the glass. At the moment the glass applied is vray glas with a perpendicular / parallel fall-off map. I then used a tube with the sky from the photograph applied to it for reflections. The result I am getting is very bland..

I am wondering if there are any ways to improve either in max or in photoshop for this type of rendering. Any help much appreciated

 

tbny

[innerdream]

Have you tried an HDRI as a background sky?

[tbny]

I am stuck with a background photo and have no hdri data for it unfortunately

[AJLynn]

Can you override the reflection environment with an HDRI, or comp the photo in Photoshop later? You can't have something be reflective looking unless it has something with contrast to reflect - the more contrast the better, so HDRs are usually best.

[innerdream]

I then used a tube with the sky from the photograph applied to it for reflections.

 

Fake it. Find some clouds and apply those to your tube to reflect, if it's subtle it may work.